When She Was Gone (13 page)

“You do, dude,” said Carl. “I know you like music. It's not such a big deal, maybe this guy didn't do anything.”

“It just makes me sick,” said Pete, snapping on his gloves to dig through a pile of laundry like a fastidious kid searching for a lost coin in a pile of sand.

Carl looked under the bed; he went into the closet, which was naked except for one tuxedo and one blue suit hanging among the empty hangers like leafless trees. No loose floorboards. No hidden compartments. Just the smell of cedar and apricots and apple rot. The radiator began to hiss and clang.

“Hey,” called Beau from downstairs. “Anything?”

“Another
gown
. Baby blue. I packed it up. Just ask him where he left the fucking sweatshirt,” grunted Pete. He kicked the bedpost, and the thinnest sliver of oak cracked off like a toothpick.

Carl leaned over to pick it up. “Shit,” he said. “Now I have a splinter.” He sucked at his finger and slid the bit of wood into his pocket in the absence of any other evidence.

In the end they took him in. He wasn't an agitated subject, he was placid. He asked to bring his tweed hat and though he may've tapped his fingers in an annoying rhythm all the way into Hackensack in the squad car, he didn't protest. Which made Pete suspicious. Not Beau, Beau was suspicious of their own intentions. He noticed that Pete pushed Mr. Leonard into the car with a little too much force, so the
old man bumped his head on the edge of the open door. He noticed that Mr. Leonard was pale and seemed confused, but he remembered Mr. Leonard at the piano, beside him on the bench, telling him to listen to the music in his head before he leaned into the keys, to hear what it was he meant to say before letting his fingers speak.

DAY THREE

26 SYCAMORE STREET

S
he called Barq, the private detective they'd hired, once every two hours, except when she couldn't bear to wait the last two minutes, the last fifteen. He had been paradoxically patient and irritable with Abigail, listening to her minute confessions, her ideas, her redundant concerns. Just ten minutes ago she'd called and he picked up on the first ring.

“Mrs. Stein. I'm on my way to Providence.”

“What—the boy she met from Brown at that party?” There had been a photograph—she'd sent a picture to Timmy of her too-pink face too close to Markos's on one side, and another boy's on the other. Markos told them he was a fellow Linsey had met when she visited Brown earlier in the year—Markos was uncomfortable reporting on the party, as if he were betraying her to Timmy, to Abigail when they asked. Finally he'd said that maybe Linsey had flirted with him, but maybe she hadn't—he had been too caught up in the party himself to notice.

“Timmy thinks that he just doesn't want to say he was drunk,” Barq told her.

Timmy had let Barq copy everything from his phone—which
made Abigail guilty and grateful, both. Barq had shown her the cell phone picture, and she'd wondered when Linsey's cheekbones had gotten so clear, obscuring the sweet round of her cheeks. She'd looked at the boy from Brown and thought he looked like he kissed his mother's cheek; too innocent. But Barq was following up.

“Yes.” He was calm. He needed a lozenge; his voice sounded phlegmy. “It may be nothing, Mrs. Stein. The police are canvassing your neighbors.”

“Good,” she said. “Because some of those people notice every car turning around in their driveways and who hasn't clipped their lawn.” She felt mildly disingenuous—she pretended not to notice these things, but she did, too.

“And you might want to invite the boyfriend over, Timmy. He has been very cooperative and might open up to you.”

“He hates me,” she said. She felt a quick stab of sadness. It was her fault, all of it—she'd broken them up because she saw Linsey headed down the same path she had taken, but Linsey couldn't have taken that path; Linsey was too smart and too aware and besides, Timmy just wasn't Joe.

“But he doesn't hate Linsey,” said Barq. “You should let me work and I'll let you know what I find.”

“Okay,” she said. It wasn't okay. “Have you checked—” But her pause had been too long.

“God bless,” he said, as he always said, just before ending their calls. It made her nervous. Generally, Abigail was only used to the invocation of God at funerals, or in jest.

Abigail's days swam in slow motion, and passed in fast-forward.
Linsey was her baby; Linsey was holding her twin baby brothers. Linsey had been stolen or had stolen herself away. Abigail couldn't decide whether her daughter could ever want to hurt her that much, but she knew the tearing apart from Timmy had left her daughter frayed. She used to feel as though she'd forgotten something; it was a sort of perpetual anxiety, something swallowed too soon before tasting, the lost idea, this side of eureka, or worse, toeing the line between safety and danger because she wasn't vigilant about watching her feet. In the months after she lost her son, Abigail woke and slept, a blurry line; she'd rather have been asleep all the time, to never wake, because when she woke, she remembered, over and over, she started, she stepped on falling ground, her son, her baby, she needed to get to him, only he was gone, not only gone, he was dead. She'd taken medication for a week or two, she never knew what it was, because Joe or her mother administered the capsules, and she took them, swallowed with a cup of juice like a child learning the art of pharmaceutical compliance. Afterward, she ate one cracker, or two spoonsful of applesauce, again, a child. “You need this for your stomach,” Joe said, or her mother, “To keep your tummy from hurting.” Her mother, she remembered why she loved her mother, those months. She didn't want to see her face, only to smell her woolly sleeves coming in close to tuck her in, her hand smooth and vaguely vanilla with Oil of Olay touching Abigail's own cheek, her shoulder, her back, leading her into the bathroom as if she'd forgotten where it was, needed help to walk. She had; she did.

Everything was different now. Abigail held off from calling her mother. This was temporary, this was missing, this was not dead. She let herself think, once or twice, what her Linsey would look like dead, only in her imagination, Linsey was a baby again, with her first downy hair, a dove gray, her eyes still blue, before they turned green, her knees still bent from the cramped womb. She saw this dead Linsey twice, the first night she had to sleep in the house without her daughter, and last night, when it had been three days since Linsey left, since she didn't hear the screen door sighing shut behind her, since Linsey had not gone to work and had not come home. She'd stayed up talking with Frank, loving his hands around hers, loving the comfort of his voice, answering her thoughts or just taking them in as she spilled everything out of her mouth. She only ever did this with Frank—with everyone else in the world she edited. Even the shrink she'd seen after the lost baby, even when she was lost inside her own head she still softened things, chose her words—Joe was very busy, not selfish; Linsey was grieving in her own way, not shouldering the weight of the house, a tiny superhero.

“I know the regular police aren't going to make this a priority, but you'd think Barq would step it up, I mean, we're paying him so much—”

“Never mind that,” said Frank. His hands smoothed hers, as if he could lengthen the lifeline, the love line, with his fingers on her palms. “Money is money, but if you want, I'll call him more often.”

“I call him every two hours,” she admitted. “I know I said
twice a day, but I can't help it—except at night; I let him have four or five hours to sleep. He does usually answer.”

“You should call him as often as you want,” said Frank.

“What we need is someone who works at it all the time,” she said. She was working at it all the time. After Frank slept, she sat at the computer, researching abduction, runaways, looking online for any reference to Linsey's name, lurking in chat rooms where parents who lost their children grieved. She wouldn't look at those screens straight on, but she scanned them with her glasses off, hoping to see some clues, some ideas, something she hadn't tried yet.

“I think he's pretty good, but if you think we need to hire someone else—”

“What we need is to have her home.”

“Yes.”

“I haven't called Cornell again, I should call Cornell again. I just didn't want them to think I'm insane. I asked whether she'd checked in early, I didn't tell them anything. The first time. The second time I just asked when the dorms opened—”

“You can call Cornell again. Or I can call for you.”

She sighed and kissed him. An ordinary kiss—extraordinary anxiety.

“You'd call Cornell?” she asked his regular breathing.

“I'll call Cornell,” he said. “I'll call anyone you would like me to call.”

She kissed him good night again, then thought to tell him what she'd read online, that highly successful teens are
often very good at hiding drug problems. That sometimes they get caught when it's minor, but the relapses go unnoticed, because unlike the underachievers, the overachievers don't want to disappoint their parents by getting caught. She wanted to catch Linsey wherever she was, whatever she'd done; not that she suspected drugs any more than anything else. Catch her, arms wide, swing her into her own body like a child instead of an almost woman. Or throw herself onto whoever had taken her—or tempted her away. Abigail hadn't been vigilant—she couldn't know. She should know whether Linsey would run away so close to moving away—it didn't make sense, but then, she was at a vulnerable time, between the shelter of home and the sparser protection of college. It was all lost, her chance at being the fairy godmother, silver shadow in her daughter's childhood, protection, kindness, everything. She suspected that she'd forgotten to pay enough attention, that she'd lost her vigilance, that she'd done something to anger God, that he was taking another one away from her for her own faults. But Linsey didn't deserve to suffer; Linsey's sins were so minor they were hardly sins.

•   •   •

She had been in Linsey's room a dozen times; she'd unpacked and repacked the trunk, she'd examined the contents of closets and drawers, each time nervous, as if Linsey might be under the bed, watching. She knew this: she knew her daughter was alive. Then she didn't know. She had always envied the surety people had, or feigned enough to believe
themselves—my baby will be a boy, I know it, or this will be a good year for the market, or I just know I'm going to meet the right man before I'm thirty—this was her friend Leslie, who was still single at thirty-nine, but who had changed her belief to before forty. It wasn't something she had. She hadn't known anything about her babies before they were born, except, of course, the details revealed about the twins by myriad tests, which she still didn't believe until they were born, and then, until they were two weeks old, and then, two months, two years. She didn't believe in the right to wake every day knowing your children are safe, how could she? She thought, at least, she could watch for them as best she could, in both the waking and dream worlds.

The neighbors were so full of certainties. Today the
Ridgewood Times
would come out with an article, she'd been told, about Linsey, and Ridgewood would, the world would know her daughter was gone. Maybe it would help. Maybe someone knew something, but Abigail felt as though the shades were being snapped up to reveal her family, naked. She didn't deserve privacy now, she thought. She'd let anyone into her home, to her search—they could read Abigail's juvenile journals, see her worst double-chin photographs and bad housekeeping, her favorite ratty underwear, if her daughter came back.

She knew things were missing from the closet—she'd been in that closet so many times, hide-and-seek, arranging and rearranging the dresses-to-grow-into, then a lull, then searching for any sort of evidence after she found the drugs.
But she couldn't remember what else belonged, what else was missing; her mental catalog was a mess. The prom dress, the champagne silk; she went with Timmy of course, lost in their collective happiness—where was it? Yes. Here was the narrow lavender sheath she'd worn to graduation. A lipstick stain on the collar, dirt on the hem. The dress was more beautiful; Linsey had been less beautiful in it because she was miserable about Timmy, but pretended the breakup had been her own idea. An appeasement for Abigail—but a lie.

Linsey had all the silver half-dollars Abigail had left for her, as the tooth fairy, in one of Joe's old socks with the leg end tied. It looked like a weapon. Where was her daughter? Abigail thought about the three days before she went missing, as the detective had suggested, looking at a calendar, writing out her hours, remembered what she had been doing. Nothing important. It was shocking to see her days written out like that, how much time she frittered away looking out windows or driving to soccer practice or holding on to cooking magazines without reading, as if they might emit some great source of inspiration through contact with their glossy covers. What a waste, she thought, leaving her single-minded obsession with her daughter for a minute. What was she doing, was she living, or just ticking, a clock, winding down, using up its battery?

She wrote it down—she'd been chatting with Beth Boris, whom she had met in a Pilates class. Beth was one of those women who belonged here, who was comfortable in the snail
shell of the town. They'd gossiped about other people's children and where they were accepted to college or wait-listed and Abigail had felt culpable by association but had nodded when Beth told her about the parties some kids had, drinking and sex on the lawns. She nodded and looked shocked when Beth told her their pediatrician's daughter was caught with hash and a pipe.

But at least Beth talked to her. Other neighbors nodded and said, “Let's get together!” and didn't mean it.